The UBC Senate has endorsed principles for digital learning materials used for assessment that address affordability and support open resources and platforms.
For Cindy Underhill empathy supports open learning: “For me, inclusive learning means you are really attending to a student’s sense of belonging, their ideas about relevance and the diversity of experiences they’re bringing to that learning environment.”
In academic year 2018, an estimated 15,388 UBC students were impacted by courses using open resources in place of paid textbooks or readings.
UBC geography professor Siobhán McPhee is using technology to expand traditional learning spaces and make education accessible and relevant to more students.
Janette Bulkan, Assistant Professor in the Faculty of Forestry, is initiating student-led projects on the UBC Wiki, an open-source platform, to facilitate students as producers of knowledge.
For David Gaertner, it is important that his students have the opportunity to create work with a broader impact, that can live beyond the classroom walls.
For Jonathan Verrett, the use of open source tools is important as they allow others to build upon previous work and resources. "That allows educators to have access to more powerful tools to train students.”
According to Tara Robertson, accessibility librarian at CAPER-BC, accessibility can help push the open education movement even further forward. Open educational resources and content should be accessible to all people.
For Christina Hendrics the value of "peer to peer connecting is partly that students will learn a lot not just from what they hear from other people but from what they tell to other people. Conversations with other students bring such different perspectives and interpretations."
Maja Krzic: "If we don’t evolve, if we don’t try to do new things, we are trapped in how our discipline is taught and regarded. So I am hopeful that [open education] will continue to grow in popularity and use in my discipline."
